Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Installing Jaunty UNR in VirtualBox

Sometimes it's useful to be able to run Ubuntu as a virtual machine inside VirtualBox for testing and debugging purposes. The problem with the basic version of VirtualBox is that it does not support installing from USB, which is a problem when faced with installing from USB images, such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). To get around this, install UNR as follows:

Create a new VM using the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-bootable-i386.vdi (at the Virtual Hard Disk dialogue box, select "Existing" and browse the filesystem to select the .vdi file). Once you have created the VM, add the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.vdi as a IDE primary slave drive. Then boot and install UNR to the IDE primary slave.

After the installation is complete remove the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-bootable-i386.vdi primary drive from your virtual machine and set ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.vdi to be the primary IDE drive.